.johnboehnerstillin the house for the time being at the treasury. the president is back in the white house and harry reid is in the senate with a few more seats. why should i believe this would end any more positively than the summer of 2011? >> because again i'm not going to try to talk to you in optimism but let's look at what's changed. you have republican leadership acknowledging for the first time in this debate in public that it's agreed to increase in revenues as part of an agreement that helps restore fiscal balance. that's a very important change. you can debate on what motivated that change, and of course it's true that approach has been a popular very substantial support among the american people. you have a much greater recognition that the economy would benefit on a carefully designed balanced agreement on fiscal reform and putting it off indefinitely is not good for the country. that's important, too. and i also think again if you listen carefully to what people are saying and what many politicians are saying with many elected representatives are saying there's a lot of

a guy before i worked for romney i workedforboehnerinthe majority leader officer, i called up the digital guy tell me about twitter. how it's going work. he said you don't need to know it. it's not a big thing. here we're now, i notice during the campaign so much of what we did was driven from the bottom up through twitter. and -- even when i was on the plane. we would do the different gaggle. she would do it on a bigger plane. air force one. we call pear force one. i would got back of the plane and gaggle for fifteen or twint minutes. by the time i would come back i would come back on twitter and say it made news. >> people responded and taked you on twitter. >> when you say people you don't mean people you mean reporters. >> or people. [laughter] reporters are not people. >> that was on the free to be you and me. the reporters are people. but you mean this was the kind of back stage conversation you were watching playout on twitter? sometimes real people. it was more important how the journalist were using twitter. >> yeah. it became a incredible news. you could see the jour

it off track when there were in fact very close. ithinkboehnerhasbeen very clear. i think revenues are on the table. they are at the moment drawing a line on tax rates, but we will see where that goes. the last time, you are right, didn't work and we were not facing quite the same set of circumstances we are facing today so i'm cautiously optimistic although i will offer to say lastly that people sometimes say okay, it looks like simpson-bowles, everything in between zero and $4 trillion we could end up with all kinds of outcomes that may be less than i would like and maybe less than all of you would like but at least something. i'm hoping it is more over here but i don't know. >> and steve, so we are gathered here to talk about u.s. global competitiveness. how important is resolving these issues to the american position on the global economy? >> first of all i think it's important not just our position in the global comment about our position in the world. admiral mullen who was the previous chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said our greatest national security threat was our f